the recent explosion in payday loans needs a lot more publicity, i think; but 'coupon cutting'? such an Americanism. People I know have been using e-coupons/discounts since before the crash - but they're not 'cutting coupons' in the traditional (ie American) sense, and if anything coupons encourage more spending, not less...

I can't help thinking Nick's bemoaning a lack of riots is linked to his consistent prediction of middle-class rioting, about 2 years ago... Also surely there HAVE been riots in Britain, aside from the tottenham ones, in recent times? as well as massive demonstrations, etc.

though i actually feel sorry for him about the titles the subs gave him.

Of course the fact that there are clearly some of the same people involved in both 'student riots' and these ones in Tottenham means nothing...

Bonus HP Sauce (kerching) points today for their immediately lambasting Lee Jasper - who, lest we forget, was integral to the founding of Operation Trident - for, er, I'm not quite sure really. I think it's for calling the riots in tottenham an 'uprising', which a certain part of them surely was - afaict they largely got out of hand thanks to the police attacking a teenage girl. looting wasn't necessarily related to that, but still. HP Sauce also seem upset that Jasper has offered legal advice to all arrested - not quite sure what's wrong with that either. If I was a bit more cynical I'd suggest that HP Sauce would lambast him for whatever he said.

Yes--after about a thousand words it ends up with "nothing to see". Here's the concluding para:

*** Because, yes, we have been here before, with a relatively small number of young men, high on violence and low on personal skills, finding a way to drive the rest of us mad. This analysis is both gloomy and hopeful. It suggests that, short of a world war to send them to, difficult and violent young men will always be with us. The numbers matter, of course, and we can and should whittle away at them with firmness. But we won't eradicate them altogether, and if improvement is always slow and adapting difficult, we can - of course - make things worse quickly, by reacting with impatience, prejudice and stupidity. ***

Can I be the first to say that that is a brilliant paragraph and gets to the very nub of the problem.

One small quibble, I'm watching the debate in the House of Commons at the moment, and, although I'm older than the Prime Minister, "young" is stretching a point. Otherwise the favouring of violence and lack of skills is clearly in evidence.

Since then the country’s police services have been suffering a public nervous breakdown, quaking at every public-relations setback and buckling under mounting restrictions on their ability to their jobs at all. Currently, the Metropolitan Police is actually leaderless, its commissioner having resigned last month in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

Yes, political correctness claims another scalp. In a perfect world, policemen could take bribes and beat black kids. Waah! our society is so broken!